Philosophy, lit, etc.

Friday, February 22, 2019

I was born after the first malls had opened, but they still confronted me as a deviation from the norm, which had been established for me by the traditional, downtown hub of Goderich, Ontario. The town's agora was the Square, an area delimited by a road that (ignoring its name) follows the contour of an octagonal yard, in which stands the Huron County courthouse. The town's main shops and businesses lined the outer edge of the road. Our house was a short walk north of the Square, which I visited often with friends or on errands for my parents. Attempts to reconcile the Square's name and shape flabbergasted my juvenile mind, yet I came to accept the contradiction as something perfectly natural and puzzling to outsiders only.

The new courthouse, built in 1954 (Wikimedia Commons, JustSomePics [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)])

One was continually meeting history in Goderich -- in the old jail (already a museum when I lived there), in the lore about devastating storms that had swept in from the lake, in the local museum with its stuffed, two-headed calf and yard full of old artillery pieces, in the war memorial on the courthouse lawn.

The most conspicuous history was a product of the early-to-mid-19th century, when the place was planned and built as an outpost of the British Empire. The Empire loomed at practically every turn. Among the town's streets are these: Victoria St., Trafalgar St., Nelson St., Wellington St., Waterloo St., Wolfe St., Brock St., Elgin Ave. The commemorations said little of the Indigenous peoples who had lived there for millennia: the Wendat (or Wyandotte), after whom the county was named, the Attiwandarons of the 'Neutral'Confederacy, and the Mississaugas. They were, for the most part, gone from the town and its official, public memory.

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Follow-up 1: Almost one year ago, I posted a list of UK philosophers who were among the combatants in WWI. I've added another name to that list: LeonRoth, who served in the Jewish Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. Like Rupert Clendon Lodge (see previous post), Roth won Oxford's John Locke Scholarship in Mental Philosophy and taught at Manchester University before leaving England. Roth then taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

It's been easier to identify French or Germanphilosophers who fought in WWI. I guess that's because France and Germany sent higher percentages of their male populations to one of the fronts, including many more middle-aged men, who were old enough to have begun a career in academic philosophy.

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

I've been reading up on the history of Canadian philosophy. Anglo-Canadian academic philosophy was strongly influenced by British, particularly Scots, Hegelians. In 1994, JohnBurbidge published 'Hegel in Canada', a short piece in which he documented Hegel's influence in Canada via JohnWatson (among others), a student of EdwardCaird's who taught at Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario). According to Burbidge, Watson influenced the training of Presbyterian clergy at Queen's. Here's another item on Hegel and Canada; it's by sociologist David MacGregor.

A new collection of papers, Hegel and Canada (ed. Susan Dodd & Neil G. Robertson), will be released in 2018 by the University of Toronto Press.

In his paper on Watson's influence at Queen's, Burbidge quoted a line about 'seeing life clearly and seeing it whole'. He says that he had often heard these words during his Canadian upbringing, and he takes the phrase to be an especially apt characterization of an idealist outlook. (Update [Jan. 1, 2019]: 'The true is the whole' [Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 'Preface', trans. Terry Pinkard, sec. 20 -- that last link is to the older trans. by J. B. Baillie].)

Finally, one of the British idealists who moved to Canada was RupertClendonLodge (1886-1961). He was influenced mainly by Bosanquet's version of idealism. Lodge won Oxford's John Locke Scholarship in Mental Philosophy and taught at the University of Manchester before leaving England. He was visiting Germany on a scholarship when WWI began. He had to leave in a hurry. After fleeing Germany, he taught at the University of Minnesota. He bounced around between there and the University of Alberta before settling in at the University of Manitoba (in Winnipeg) in 1920, where he was appointed Professor of Logic and History of Philosophy and headed the philosophy department for almost thirty years. I've started a public page on Lodge at Ancestry.com.

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

One hundred years ago the terrible WWI Battle of Caporetto began (on Oct. 24). The battle was named for a town that is now in Slovenia (and is called 'Kobarid' in Slovene) and that used to be in Yugoslavia, in Italy, in Austria-Hungary, etc.

It was a cataclysmic defeat for the Italians that nearly knocked them out of the War. In the cultural memory, what the Somme is for the British and Canadians, and what Verdun is for the French and Germans, Caporetto is for the Italians. Technically, while Italy lost at Caporetto, the British won the Somme and the French won at Verdun, but these last two battles nonetheless signify for all parties involved the War's senselessness and catastrophic waste.

Like other major WWI engagements, Caporetto's cultural ramifications reverberated for many years after the War and include important literary works by people who were swept up in the battle or its aftermath. In English there's Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, which describes the Italian retreat and derives partly from the author's experiences with a volunteer ambulance service in Italy about six months after Caporetto.

The Italians faced an attacking force of Germans and Austro-Hungarians. ErwinRommel led part of the German group. The Hapsburg troops included many Slovenes, Croatians, Bosnian Muslims, and Hungarians. Among the Hapsburg officers at Caporetto were Ludwig von Mises and the composer ViktorUllmann, who survived WWI but was murdered at Auschwitz Oct. 18, 1944.

I always believed that being a Cubs fan built strong
character. It taught a person that if you try hard enough and long enough, you'll still lose. And that's the story of life. .... [a year later] Being a
Cub Fan prepares you for life because everyone in life winds up a loser.
Just check the cemetery. (Royko, 'A Farewell to Cubs' April 20, 1980, and 'When Ya Gotta Go' April 9, 1981, rpt. in For the Love of Mike: More of the Best by Mike Royko [University of Chicago Press, 2001], p. 35 & p. 40)

[Aunt Julia's] cat for a great many years was a large tom, whom even I (who am inclined to be weak about cats) must admit to have been ugly, greedy, lecherous, and lacking in affection. She lavished good food on him .... She had named him Urijah .... Urijah survived his mistress for several years. He was treated with the same marked generosity by my cousin Ernest, who surely cannot have approved of his character, and died in extreme and unlovely old age. (Broad, 'Autobiography', The Philosophy of C. D. Broad, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp [NY: Tudor Publishing Company, 1959], p. 20)

James Lees-Milne (1942): '... Ronnie Norman, the eternal handsome schoolboy, noisily loquacious until
he finds the conclusion to an argument, when he stops like an unwound
clock.' (James Lees-Milne, Diaries, 1942-1954, ed. Michael Bloch, entry for Jan 12, 1942)

I found an antecedent of the Government of Canada's advice in an Ontario high-school textbook from the 1920s. The book is called High-School English Composition. (H. W. Irwin and J. F. van Every [Toronto: The Copp Clark Company, 1921, rpt. 1929]) The authors say that the serial comma should be used only when necessary. To exemplify its capacity to alter one's meaning, they give this example:

During the Great War, when the British troops were engaged in a critical struggle with the Germans for the possession of Hill 70, General French sent the following message to England: 'We captured the western outskirts of Bulluch [sic., should be Hulluch], the village of Loos, and the mining works around it and Hill 70.' By an error, the message was made to read: 'We captured the western outskirts of [H]ulluch, the village of Loos, and the mining works around it, and Hill 70.' The insertion of the comma after 'it' conveyed the impression that Hill 70 had been captured. In consequence, public celebrations and rejoicings were held in all parts of the country. (pp. 199-200)

There has been a misunderstanding on this point. The message from Sir John French, which was published in the papers of Sept. 27, stated that we had captured the western outskirts of Hulluch village, Loos and the mining works around it and Hill 70. This was been [sic.] read to mean that Hill 70 had been taken. If the words were correctly read it would be seen that the capture only of the mining works around Hill 70 was claimed.

Sunday, October 2, 2016

Critical thinking is often associated with what psychologists call metacognition. In such cognition, the mind thinks (and hopefully gains knowledge) about its own operations. This is akin to what Kant pursued in his own work, where the mind turns its focus back upon itself in order to reflect on its own functioning. Philosophers say that such thinking is 'higher-order' in nature (though they sometimes reserve this phrase for a more restricted kind of thought). Here, 'higher-order' does not mean simply that the thinking is very sophisticated; rather, the point is that such thoughts take as their object further thoughts (just as higher-orderdesiresare directed at other desires).

Some authors identify critical thinking with a specific type of higher-order thinking or metacognition. For example, in his unpublished, 1940 dissertation, Richard Edward Gadske* writes:

The adjective 'critical', therefore, suggests a
very special
phase of
thinking. Thus, critical thinking becomes a process of becoming aware
and criticising the thinking that has already taken place. In other
words, it is a process of thinking about thinking from the point of view
of a critic.' (Gadske, Demonstrative Geometry as a Means for Improving
Critical Thinking, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northwestern
University [Evanston, Illinois,
June, 1940], p. 9; emphasis added)

A critic, says Gadske, is one 'who expresses a judgment on
any matter with respect to its value, truth, or beauty'. (Ibid.) However, Gadske's notion of critical thinking might extend beyond what philosophers typically mean by 'higher-order thinking' and what psychologists seem to mean by 'metacognition', since it may be directed at the thinking of others (rather than just at one's own thinking). As Gadske puts it, critical thinking occurs

... when a person is analyzing his own thinking as well
as the thinking of others through the media of self-scrutiny,
questioning, discrimination, search, and research with respect to any
situation that may be of interest or of vital concern to him. (Ibid.; emphasis added)

But critical thinking, on Gadske's conception, may yet be a species of higher-order thought or metacognition. After all, even if my aim is to assess the thoughts of someone else, it's hard to see how I can do so without exploring those thoughts, and this seems to require me to think those thoughts (or relevantly similar ones). I have to make those thoughts my own before I can subject them to critical scrutiny. Also, recall (from the previous post) that critical thinking is plausibly taken to be directed at a decision that culminates in a judgment of my own. That is, the outcome should be a decision about what I ought to think (or believe or conclude). Thus, even if my focus initially was on someone else's thinking, the critical-thinking process must include a step whereby I assess the thoughts and consider the sort of judgment that I ought to form about them.

Still, one may doubt that critical thinking is always a matter of thinking about one's own thinking. When I reflect on whether local real-estate prices will go up in the next year, I entertain propositions about recent market trends, interest rates, the approaching introduction of a new land-transfer tax, etc. Here, my thoughts seem transparent: rather than thinking of them, I think, via them (or through them), of the market, interest rates, new taxes, etc. Insofar as I consider logical and evidential relations, they are relations among propositions about these things (rather than relations among my thoughts about the propositions).

*Richard
Edward Gadske (1901-1989) was born in Chicago on April 4, 1901. He held a B.S. in Electrical Engineering (awarded by the University of Colorado or the South Dakota School of Mines -- the records are conflicting --
in 1925) and two advanced degrees in Education from Northwestern University: an M.S. (1932) and a doctoral degree (1940). As an undergraduate, he played on a varsity football team for four years. For most of his career, he taught math at New Trier High School (Winnetka, Illinois). He coached high-school football, basketball, baseball, and track teams. In WWII, he served for four years as a commander in the US Navy. He died on July 21, 1989. (Gadske was the high-school advisor of James C. Warren, who is one of the Tuskegee airmen. Warren played on football and baseball teams that Gadske coached, and Gadske accompanied the young Warren to father-son events.)

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

H. Reed Geertsen attributes to John Dewey an interesting distinction between 'reflective' and 'critical' thinking. According to Geertsen, Dewey 'distinguished between searching and judging and called them reflective and critical thought'. (H. Reed Geertsen, 'Rethinking Thinking about Higher-Level Thinking' Teaching Sociology, 31 [2003]: 1-19, at 2) On the one hand, says Geertsen, Dewey took reflective thought to be a 'mental process that originated with a state of doubt and then expanded into a search for ways to ease that doubt'. (Ibid.) On the other hand, Dewey is said to have 'described as critical thinking the judgments that an individual made while solving some problem'. (Ibid.) In support of his attribution, Geertsen cites Dewey's How We Think, but he supplies no page or chapter number. The book was first published in 1910, but Geertsen cites the revised, 1933 edition. (Dewey, How we think : a restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process [Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1933]; hereafter cited as '1933')

I cannot locate this distinction in either edition of How We Think. To be sure, Dewey's analysis of reflective thinking does distinguish a process of searching ('hunting', p. 112 [1910]) that culminates in a judgment. However, I cannot find a passage in which Dewey reserves the term 'critical' for the culminating act of judgment. In fact, the 1933 version of How We Think has fewer uses of 'critical' than the 1910 edition. The word 'critical' appears in the
index to the earlier edition (under 'inference') but not in the later version's index.

In fact, in some places Dewey uses 'critical' and 'reflective' interchangeably. For instance, in a 1922 reply to Laurence Buermeyer, Dewey says that Buermeyer uses the word 'reasoning' 'to express what I call critical or reflective
thinking -- thinking in its eulogistic sense'. (Dewey, 'An Analysis of Reflective Thought' The Journal of Philosophy 19 (1922):
29-38, at 31, n. 2, emphasis added)

Perhaps Dewey made the distinction in question in one of his other works (which are many).

The distinction is in accordance with the etymology of 'critic' and its cognates. The English word has its source in the ancient Greek verb krino, which implies sifting or selecting, or forming a discriminating judgment. (Dewey uses 'sifting' on p. 101 and p. 102. [1910]) The related Greek phrase kritikós indicates an ability to discern and decide. So, there is the notion of weighing or assessing something (e.g., evidence) in view of some at least tacit standards; there is also the implication of acting, or making a decision. The act is typically one of judgment. Roughly, then, one who has good judgment, or a keen critical sense, is able to decide how to judge based on some discerning insight. (Note that in German, 'beurteilen' is used to clarify kritikós.)

It is safe to say that Dewey was familiar with this etymology. According to Jay Martin's biography, Dewey studied ancient Greek in high school for three years. Moreover, the process that Dewey outlines conforms to standard interpretations of kritikós; for Dewey repeatedly emphasizes that reflective (or critical) thinking involves a searching and sifting (or 'hunting') stage, which is followed by a decision to issue a judgment. For example, in the first chapter of How We Think, Dewey writes,'Reflective thinking,
in short, means judgment suspended
during further inquiry; and suspense is likely to be somewhat painful.' (1910, p. 13) Later, he says, 'The essence of critical thinking is suspended judgment; and the essence
of this suspense is inquiry to determine the nature of
the problem before proceeding to attempts at its solution'. (1910, p. 74) Both versions of How We Think contain this sentence: 'The judgment when formed is a decision; it closes, or concludes, the question at issue.' (1910, p. 107; 1933, p. 126)

Here, the decision that terminates the search process is usually a choice, or a free action; for it is often within our power (says Dewey) to suspend or postpone it. In addition, Dewey takes the overall process of reflective (or critical) thinking to be essential to our autonomy. In both versions of How We Think, Dewey writes:

Genuine freedom, in short, is intellectual; it rests in the trained power of thought, in ability to 'turn things over,' to look at matters deliberately, to judge whether
the amount and kind of evidence requisite for decision is at hand, and if not, to tell where and how to seek
such evidence. (1910, pp. 66-7; 1933, p. 90)